What is slime?

Hey, cool cats. I’m Dr. Universe here to answer your baffling science questions like this one. What is slime? Our world is full of slime makers. Slugs make gooey trails. Bacteria create slippery slime in pipes. Slime in your joints helps protect your bones. Slime is between a solid and a liquid. It’s a non-Newtonian fluid. You can make it right at home. Dissolve a teaspoon of borax in a cup of water. In another bowl, mix together half a cup of liquid glue and half a cup of water. Then combine everything. The glue contains long chains of molecules. We call them polymers. You might think of them like cooked spaghetti noodles that are all tangled up. If we let the noodles dry out a bit, we’d see they’d start sticking to one another. What was once a free flowing liquid is now thickened by polymers, a fun slime you can mold, bounce, twist and stretch. Send me a science question of your own at AskDrUniverse.wsu.edu.